Rambhatla Krishna Murthy was a rare and versatile genius, a journalist, political cartoonist, poet, journalism teacher, historian, social anthropologist, Sanskrit scholar, and Marxist thinker, all rolled into one. He was self-taught as he never had the luxury of formal education. He was a good painter and excelled in caricatures and cartoons. He used to jokingly say that he was just a Class V graduate.
He used to address every journalist, including this writer who is little over three decades his junior, as his ‘friend’, with a disarming smile, to put them at ease. He used to lecture them for hours on a variety of subjects, from history to anthropology, from Vedas to Marxism, ancient and modern literature, not excluding contemporary politics and journalism in simple language with utmost clarity.
He used to regale them with witty anecdotes. Those who used to be his ‘patient listeners’ used to go away with some more knowledge and acquired insight into matters hitherto unknown to them.
Rambhatla was born on 24 March 1920 in the East Godavari district. He was orphaned in his infancy and was brought up by his relatives, who tossed him from one place to the other depriving him of the chance to get a formal education. He studied up to Class V in Urdu medium in Hyderabad, then under Nizam rule.
While doing odd jobs as a ‘child labourer’ he used to spend time in libraries in Hyderabad. He learnt Sanskrit to study ancient texts in their original and English to study great writers, including Karl Marx and Frederic Engels.
Rambhatla joined the Telugu edition of Meezan as a sub-editor in 1944 when Adavi Bapiraju, a poet and painter of repute, was the editor until it was closed down 1948. The Meezan used to be published in three languages, English, Urdu, and Telugu. Each newspaper used to have its own editorial policy. While the English edition, edited by an Englishman, used to be pro-British, the Urdu edition used to be the handmaid of the Nizam, while the Telugu edition used to be liberal and obliquely supported the Andhra Mahasabha, which opposed Nizam rule and yearned for independence.
Rambhatla used to run a column ‘Mirchi Masala’ in the paper, commenting on day-to-day news, with witty comments and cartoons. He used to say that he inserted information and news about the Telangana armed struggle stealthily in his columns. When the going got tough, the Nizam closed down the newspaper, forcing Rambhatla to migrate to Madras to avoid arrest and earn a living.
Another phase of his career started when joined Visalaandhra daily in 1952 when the Communist Party started it. Here he started a new experiment of writing poetic comments, limericks, accompanied by a cartoon on political developments on a daily basis. Thus Rambhatla became the first political cartoonist in Telugu and became an instant celebrity journalist.
When Ramoji Rao of Eenadu embarked on the idea of starting a journalism school to exclusively cater to his own newspaper, he persuaded Rambhatla to head it. He trained batches of journalists who later became reputed journalists and editors.
He was a poet and writer of high standing in Telugu. He died in 2001 at the age of 81. The present generation of journalists has a lot to learn from the life and writings of Rambhatla Krishna Murthy, a Guru of journalists.
(The writer is a senior journalist based in Hyderabad and former member of Press Council of India)